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Originally Posted by avantman42
I don't know enough about US fair rights exemptions to know how water-tight Google's case was, but Wikipedia says that the appeals court found unanimously for Google. That suggests to me that Google had a pretty good case.
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They did.
(At least in the second phase, once the orphan works land-grab "settlement" with the AG got tossed.)
What google did was create a full text database from the scans and use that to run searches to automatically extract quotes around the search text.
There was a legal issue about whether scanning the books consituted a copyright violation but copyright is about distribution and Google isn't distributing the full text. It is no different from any of us scanning and ocr'ing a book solely for personal use with no distribution. (Or creating an omnibus ebook out of a series of stories or novels.) That the court found to be fair use.
Once the scanning issue went away, all that remained was the industrial-scale automated quotes, which *is* distribution but also explicitly defined as fair use.
As the court said, Google pushed the limits of fair use (through scale and automation) but didn't cross the line. The case really ended when the court determined that the act of scanning, by itself, is not a violation of copyright.
When the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal it let the lower court ruling stand and it will serve as precedent that merely scanning and OCR'ing a book, even on an industrial scale is not by itself a violation of copyright.
Falls under the category of: "Good to know."
